Interest in “what will the future be like” has nearly doubled worldwide since 2020, according to Google Trends, and in a very short space of time, our lives have become saturated with countless tales of what lies ahead.
Everywhere we look, we’re presented with another breathless vision of the future. There are those who are optimistic about it, or at least willing to sell us on their future vision, from which they will presumably profit. Corporate strategists in their half-zip fleeces deliver their incredible projections with such bombastic confidence, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the dotted lines on their charts were as real as the solid ones. Our TV screens feed hundreds of hours of future content into our lives, from golden age heroic movies and contemporary dystopian TV shows to the countless news reports and documentaries that paint the future as an utterly terrifying place. Behind all of this, our religious storytellers continue to chug away, delivering their own reliable backbeats of salvation and oblivion.
We tend to dress up our ideas about the future as speculations, predictions or projections, but in truth they’re all just stories, guesses, really — little snatches of life that we show to one another in the hope that we’ll get nods of agreement or approval. Unfortunately — whether these stories are told using words, numbers or pictures — the future is almost always presented as a place of extremes.
Each of us might find these extremes to be disastrous or desirable, but we all tend to focus on the wildest scenarios, the sharpest spikes and the thinnest ends of the bell curve. But this habit is doing us no favors and is distracting us from reality. Once it gets here, the future won’t feel extreme; it will feel ordinary. It’s just that our idea of ordinary will shift a bit.
Take a look around: The present offers us all the evidence we need.
When I was a kid in the 1980s, a watch showed the time and — if you were really lucky — the date, but today my watch monitors my pulse when I’m asleep, and it can call 911 if I pass out. The first helium-neon laser was built by Bell Labs at a cost of $2 million, but today I can buy a laser pointer to tease my cat for a couple of bucks from 7-Eleven. There’s a robot vacuum cleaner at my mate Andy’s house, the pope is on Instagram, same-sex marriage is legal in nearly 40 countries and I have little pieces of Gore-Tex stitched into my heart.
Whether you look at the world from a technological, political, scientific or societal perspective, many aspects of life today are radically different from the lives our grandparents knew. But it doesn’t really feel like that, does it? These things seem ordinary and normal to us. We’ve absorbed them into our lives, and they feel like regular parts of 2025. In a word, they feel mundane.
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